Clown Torture

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Date:

1987

Artist:

Bruce NaumanAmerican, born 1941

About this artwork

Bruce Nauman’s wildly influential, relentlessly imitated work explores the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure. One of the artist’s most spectacular achievements to date, Clown Torture consists of two rectangular pedestals, each supporting two pairs of stacked color monitors; two large color-video projections on two facing walls; and sound from all six video displays. The monitors play four narrative sequences in perpetual loops, each chronicling an absurd misadventure of a clown (played to brilliant effect by the actor Walter Stevens). In “No, No, No, No (Walter),” the clown incessantly screams the word no while jumping, kicking, or lying down; in “Clown with Goldfish,” the clown struggles to balance a fish bowl on the ceiling with the handle of a broom; in “Clown with Water Bucket,” the clown repeatedly opens a door booby-trapped with a bucket of water that falls on his head; and finally, in “Pete and Repeat,” the clown succumbs to the terror of a seemingly inescapable nursery rhyme. The simultaneous presentation and the relentless repetition creates an almost painful sensory overload. With both clown and viewer locked in an endless loop of failure and degradation, the humor soon turns to horror.

Mississauga, the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto, “18: Beckett,” essays by Terry Eagleton and Séamus Kealy, November 9-–December 21, 2006, cat. 5; traveled to the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts, March 31–May 27, 2007.

[Leo Castelli Gallery, New York]; [Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, by 1988]; sold to private collection, Madrid, by 1989; [Donald Young Gallery, Chicago]; sold to Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, 1990; fractionally sold and given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997.